Retirement is postponed!

I was ready to retire in a few short years, but now Obama wants to raise the retirement age. The full benefit age will be 70. Of course, his popularity will decline further if he were to implement this idea.  Old people get awful mad when somebody tries to dismantle anything dear to them and historically politicians stay from any changes at all in social security because of this political fallout.  So the lesson for politicians is to pick on less popular programs and they'll last a long time in politics.  Oh, yeah their retirement package is pretty awsome, so they don't have to worry at all.  The only thing they will have to worry about is will somebody pick them up at the end of the day when their kids put them on a park bench and let them fend for themselves.

Damn, I might be lucky to hang on that long anyway. To be truthful, I’m lucky to be even considering retirement. I seen so many of my relatives and friends die young and I mean damn young. I guess so many of us thought we were lucky to reach 30 and anything after that were considered bonus years. For the longest time, Indians never lived long enough to worry about any retirement.  I think the life expectancy for Indians was 49 years old and it might be a tad higher now. In addition, Indians always had low paying jobs, so any real social security was minimal and there wasn't anything called a 401 K for years and years.  Getting old for many Indians only promised harder times if they didn't have somebody to take care of them.

I could get up a list of things I want to do before I kick off at age 71. Isn’t that the way it works, as soon as you retire, you die instantly. What could that list be? I have no ambitions to see Hawaii and its pretty beaches, don’t really care if I see Phoenix again, and oh maybe it would be nice to see Europe. My brother Larry was stationed in Germany after he left Vietnam and saw quite a few European countries and wrote me what he saw there, so I guess it would be like de ja vu, if I did go there. So I guess I can rule that out, plus who wants to figure out currency exchanges?

I suppose I could settle for taking my grandchildren to a few places in the lower 48. I saw Alaska and it was right pretty. Sarah Palin was still in high school before she become a rock star that she is today.  I didn’t see her on that trip, but I saw some moose, bear and a bunch of eagles.  I can't go too far South, I might get deported and who wants to see western Kansas again? I don't want to see the oil fields of Texas, Louisiana and Florida, thanks to Exxon or was it some other company who did all that damage?

Probably my best bet would be to stay close to home and watch all the theatrics and drama here.  That's worth the price of admission to this reservation, or for that matter any reservation. The cost of living is a lot better than most places.  There are some really good people here and that ain't true everywhere, so I think I'll stay here and watch the grass grow in my yard and garden. It was Mickey Mantle or somebody who
said “if I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”